


Welcome Home

by Randomixx



Series: Brave Hart [1]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Action/Adventure, Canon-Typical Violence, Essentially the introduction to a multi-fic novelisation of the whole game, Gen, first hints at over-arching plots, my friends are enablers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-12
Updated: 2016-04-08
Packaged: 2018-05-26 04:43:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6224380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Randomixx/pseuds/Randomixx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sammie Hartwell had been looking forward to a cushy, picture-perfect life as an employment benefits attorney and mother in the polished-chrome world of 2070's America. Instead what she got was atomic annihilation and a return to the rough-and-tumble existence of a terrified conscript, only this time it is in the crumbling ruins of Boston rather than the fiery fury of the Alaskan battlefields.</p><p>Emerging from Vault 111, she has a whole lot of questions to ask, a whole lot of lessons to learn, and a broken family to repair before she can start to call the Commonwealth home.</p><p>This is (the incredibly generic summery of) part one of that story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. You Don't Dream in Cryo

Sammie Hartwell had always liked the cliché of the “waking up” scene. It provides for the reader a way to enter into the story through the perspective of the desired character, without having to worry about the obvious disconnect of them not knowing what had happened to said character prior.

_Cold. So, so cold. Not just the clammy, cloying coldness of a teen mother’s limp and exhausted hand in her own reassuring grip, tears rolling down cheeks but past a contrastingly wide smile. Wide at the couple by her hospital bed, who would provide her child with the fulfilling life she simply couldn’t: “Can I ask just one thing..? His name is Shaun."  
_

As that character progresses from dreamland to proper consciousness, they can then start to piece together all the facts and sensations that add up to form the whole mental picture in only the way a half-waking mind could. To set the scene, establish a perspective, or to learn about the world that story is set in without a waterfall of exposition drowning the audience.

 _Rather, a deep,_ penetrating _cold, that soaked into every fibre of Sammie’s being like what had descended upon her as news broadcast of the one thing no one wanted to hear: “War… War never changes.”_

One could even make use of their state of mind _before_ waking up, too! Dreams had always played an important role in fiction, a gateway into the confusing world of the subconscious that could be anything you wished: To expose the inner struggles and desires of your characters, to recount past events if an information dump really is needed, bring attention to a small detail the readers may have overlooked, or even foreshadowing of what is to come.

_The cold that persisted even when her muscles were pushed to the point of burning up, a mad sprint for the only glimmer of hope around for miles: “Get to the vault!”_

Was it a cop-out? Oh, definitely. Falling back on the easiest tools available isn’t exactly a great indicator of writing skill or desire to challenge oneself, and some acclaimed authors even went so far as to say that they would put a book down if it included more than one “waking up” scene. In Sammie’s opinion, though, those types just had such a huge stick jammed up their arses that they _had_ to look down if they wanted to make eye contact from on top of it.

_Cold that should have betrayed that there was no hope beneath the stone. Cold that leaked from the pipes all around and frosted the walls, fought off and melted away only by the warmth of Nate’s smile: “We made it. This isn’t the end! This is the start of our new life.”_

If it ain’t broke. Don’t fix it.

_That spread through Nate as the life drained from him with the blood from his temple. That crystallised as his pod hissed shut again, deaf to her yelling and begging and beating against the glass of her own until her fists were also reddened: “At least we still have the backup.”_

That said. Not all “waking up” scenes are the same.

_And the cold of the floor that came rushing up to meet he–_

“Ow! Fuck!”

Sammie curled up into a ball and hissed, squeezing her elbow where she had landed on it, sending pins and needles all up and down her arm.

Okay. Yep. That definitely wasn’t a dream.

She laid there for a long while after the sensation faded from her limb, trying to make sense of the images flashing through her head. There was no way… All of it… It couldn’t be? And yet… Here she was. A heap of shivering blue jumpsuit just starting to tune into the alarm system’s monotone evacuation warning, feeling the too-cold metal of the floor with melting ice, and _not waking up_.

Reality had sunk in long ago, Sammie realised, falling limp a choked-back sob. She just wouldn’t accept it. Couldn’t yet.

But… She couldn’t just stay here, either. Not with an evacuation being ordered. She had to get up, stop being a tripping hazard, assist the others in exiting, right? Except the first thing Sammie noticed as she carefully crawled back onto her feet, was the distinctive lack of other people exiting.

“…Hello?” She croaked, and coughed to try and break her voice back in as she scanned over the rest of the decontamination room. Oh, who was she kidding? She knew full well by now that it wasn’t a decontamination room, but that didn’t make the stillness any less earie. This was an evacuation, so where were all the evacuees? In fact… None of the other pods had even opened.

There weren’t any staff in sight, either.

Sammie’s attention fell on the pod immediately to her right, and she inched over with a reluctant gulp. Her fingers felt deft and fat tapping against the glass, and a completely different type of chill fell over her while counting the seconds that her neighbour’s face showed no sign of response. Sammie took a deep breath to steady herself, hands shaking as she looked for any sign of a manual override on the freezer, and her shoulders slumped in defeat when she found one only for a computerised voice to repeatedly state an error every time she yanked on the switch.

It was the same story for the next three chambers she tried, growing more frantic and desperate with each successive attempt. No. No way. She couldn’t be the only one…

With a hiss the next one she tried released, and Sammie was about to whoop in triumph when the door lifted away to reveal its occupant. The victory was suddenly very hollow.

“…Nate.” She would have said, if her voice hadn’t outright failed her. Her throat felt tight and her arms fell against her sides, and she knew she should have been crying right now but her tear ducts must have still been frozen up. Or maybe this was all just too much to process and her brain had shut off her emotional responses as some sort of messed-up coping mechanism.

There he was, iced over and with a hole in the right of his forehead just like in the fragmented flashes of the past hour or so. The man finally fulfils his life-long dream of becoming a father and _this_ happens? His son taken from him and a bullet put in his brain, then literally stuffed in the fridge and forgotten about.

“N–no. Not forgotten. I swear!” Sammie hadn’t even realised that she was cupping his check in her hand until that moment where everything suddenly became clear, the cold practically fell away, and heated determination sliced through her like a knife. She ran her thumb along his cheek bone, then scrunched her eyes shut. She shook there for a moment, only able to shoo away the growing reality that she was a widow at the ripe old age of 33 by stepping back and blindly groping for the switch which would close Nate’s chamber again.

Silence fell save for the continuous sirens once more, Sammie swallowed the lump in her throat and finally reopened her eyes.

“I… I always joked that if you went and got yourself killed, I– I’d go over to China and conquer the whole damn place myself!” She shouted and yet her voice felt so weak, and she was becoming acutely aware of how numb she felt. It occurred to Sammie that she needed to get moving before the cold started to do her harm, but… To just leave him – all of them – here? She tried to chuckle, but couldn’t find it in her heart. “I know that as far as goodbyes go, this is pretty… Pretty crap. But. Those two that– that did you in, Nate? I never thought I’d make do on that promise. But… I have to. Not after all this. Not after I don’t have anything else left.”

Of course, Nate didn’t respond. All he could do was stare out blindly while Sammie placed her hand over the view window, miming a kiss because she didn’t dare to touch her lips to frozen anything.

She was surprised to find herself smiling. At the memory of a drunken Nate laughing and licking the post holding up the “Sold!” sign outside their home one winter’s night just because she said he shouldn’t, with the predictable result of being dragged through the front door in tears because the effort of removing his tongue from the metal pole left more than just a few taste buds behind. That was the man he should have become, the carefree dad who did stupid things just to make his wife and boy laugh, not what was before her right now. Sammie’s reminiscing smile faded.

“I’ll find them, Nate. Our boy and the assholes who took him. I’ll find them and I’ll make _sure_ that Shaun doesn’t grow up without knowing who his father – his _real_ father, not some hick who ran off as soon as he learned his girl was pregnant – was!”

As far as finality goes, her words didn’t really have any significance to them. No sense of worth lingered, echoing off the walls like Sammie thought they should have. Instead, the evacuation warnings continued to repeat on a mindless loop, and she stood there, running her fingers through her copper hair while blinking back the tears that had finally thawed out for what was probably far too long.

With one last gaze and a sniff, Sammie Hartwell finally heeded the vault’s instructions and turned to leave.

 

* * *

 

Every minute that passed while trying to make her way to the vault exit further threw Sammie for a loop. First it had been the absolute lack of anyone else running about starting to sink in as a dreadfully significant detail that she was going to have to stop overlooking, and then it was the skeletons.

As in actual, real life, _used to be people_ skeletons.

It became a lot harder to overlook how alone she was in here after that.

Some of them were even still wearing Vault-Tec uniforms that showed obvious signs of a struggle, which led directly into another realisation for Sammie to try and come to terms with: Just how long had they all been frozen down here? The process for a body to rot away to the point of there only being a skeleton left wasn’t exactly a short one, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out that Vault 111 was in fact some sort of science fiction B-movie cryostasis facility come to life.

Desperate to find _any_ sort of good news in this whole mess, Sammie decided to interpret the evidence as a sign that enough time could have passed for radiation levels to die down enough that it might be safe to leave the vault at all.

She tried to ignore the fact she had been re-frozen _after_ Shaun had been taken and couldn’t be sure of how long ago that had been, either. She had made a promise, dammit, and the hope of keeping said promise was the only thing keeping her going right now.

As she navigated the hallways and more rows of cryo pods, Sammie was even able to start feeling something resembling optimism by very deliberately twisting her thoughts: Those strangers had to have come from _somewhere_ , right? That meant that people were still alive outside, just going about their daily lives. Society must have survived, or even rebuilt. Heck, maybe she would reach the surface to find it as if the bombs had never fallen at all? It was an idea both harrowing and hopeful, and it was interrupted by a squeak followed by something dropping on Sammie’s head.

She screeched, threw her hands up and jumped on the spot while flinging her upper body about and flailing her arms around her head. The mystery object was sent flying into a wall and dropped to the floor with a pained chatter, multiple limbs tripping over themselves and foot-long antennae twitched before it charged back at Sammie with a high-pitched squeal, who yelped again and brought a boot down on top of it.

An action Sammie immediately regretted: While lifting her foot out of the resultant puddle of goo and broken chitin fragments, she retched.

“Giant… Cockroaches? What in the hell…” Those persistent little buggers managing to survive a nuclear bomb wasn’t actually all that terribly surprising, but them turning into _not-so-little_ buggers? Sammie’s earlier thought of this being like waking up in a sci-fi movie was starting to gain momentum.

More of the things were hiding elsewhere, and by the time Sammie reached what appeared to be an office her vault suit was coated in more insect innards than any one person should ever have to see. Watching them repeatedly zap themselves in the generator room that contained a reactor on the fritz – the reason the evacuation had been ordered, Sammie guessed – had been worth it, though.

The first thing her eyes fell upon while wandering by the main desk was a gun. Sammie grabbed up that and a handful of Stimpaks as quickly as she could, and praised the heavens when she found a few clips of ammo in a storage room across from it. Another gun of some sort was located along with them, but even if Sammie _had_ been able to smash up the case it was locked in, she couldn’t make head nor tail of how she could possibly operate the thing.

That, and the little armoury was significantly colder than even the rest of the vault. Rubbing her hands together to stop them shaking, Sammie moved back across to the desk and decided to see if the terminal sitting on it would still boot up when no other path revealed itself.

Much to her surprise, it was in fact working, and a cursory flick through the Overseer’s logs meant everything was finally starting to make sense.

“Oh dear…” She muttered to herself as the story unfolded, and she sighed at a later entry. Vault-Tec had not only pulled the wool over her and her fellow vault dwellers’ eyes with the human popsicle stunt, but evidently hadn’t prepared enough for the nuclear annihilation they were meant to be anticipating in the first place. Whoever had been supposed to send the all clear must never had made it to their own shelter – or the system had outright failed – because the staff of Vault 111 had been left to rot with dwindling food supplies, until mutiny broke out and not a single survivor was left.

Sammie stared at the last log file in silence for a long while. It detailed a critical failure in the life support at some indeterminate point following the staff wiping themselves out, with no cause that the automated systems could discern.

It appeared that by all accounts, it was a downright miracle that even one of the test subjects was still alive to be reading this at all.

Mouth now feeling quite dry, Sammie licked her lips and fingered out the command to open the escape tunnel as best she could with her still-shaking limbs. A nearby door slid open, she loaded the pistol, and tested her grip on it a few times before proceeding. More of the giant roaches combined with Sammie’s aim being hindered by her progressing hypothermia ate up a whole clip of 10mm rounds and a few more, but at least she wasn’t getting covered in bug guts anymore.

Exiting through another of the sliding doors that all blurred together, Sammie’s heart jumped into her throat. There it was: The exit!

She took off to the walkway at a sprint, only to trudge to a stop when she realised that she’d need to find a way to open the door first. She ran her index finger along the trigger guard of the pistol while looking around for anything resembling a control terminal or Big Red Button, and nodded when her gaze fell across a panel to the side of the vault door. Jogging across, she kicked aside a skeleton with an apologetic wince, flipped the safety cover on the switch, and whacked it with her fist.

Sammie almost recoiled when the only result was a big, fat error beep.

“Pip-Boy interface required to activate vault door cycling sequence. Have a nice day.”

“A Pip-Boy?” Like those portable computers they had been issued in the military? …That no one had been allowed to take home with them after finishing their service in the military? Sammie grit her teeth. “Where the heck am I supposed to find a– Oh.”

In hindsight it was incredibly lucky for someone who was equipped with a Pip-Boy to have been shot right by the control panel. Or lucky for Sammie, at least. She grimaced, shaking arm and hand bones out of the device before flipping the on switch and slipping it onto her own arm when it actually started to work. While the boot sequence played out she balled up the former owner’s lab coat to wipe dust off of the screen, thinking to herself that this was no doubt a handy find worth keeping hold of.

A status screen came up to show that the thing had powered up, and Sammie had been about to stand so that she could examine the controls more closely and figure out how the Pip-Boy played into it when something caught her eye on the display.

The date.

The date read 23/10/2287.

 _Twenty-two_ eighty-seven?!

“WHAT?” Sammie stood bolt upright then, holding the screen to the light and tapping at the display incredulously. No way. _Two hundred years_? She had expected same time to have passed her by, perhaps even a couple of decades, but _that_? It– it –

It _had_ to be a glitch. Maybe being left on the ground for so long with a scientist’s arm decomposing in the Pip-Boy had caused something to short…

Sammie stopped that train of thought and committed to washing the padding inside the Pip-Boy the very moment she found a water source. In the meantime, she was very thankful that the sleeves of her vault suit were long enough to be comfortably slipped underneath the thing.

She cleared her throat for no particular reason other than to refocus, and after a moment she uncovered a retractable plug and wire in the unit’s back and a matching socket in the vault door controls. Experimentally she slotted them together, and the Pip-Boy’s graphical interface was replaced by a few simple lines of text.

VAULT DOOR REMOTE ACCESS

READY

She considered it for a moment, then once again depressed the rubber of the button. The vaulted roared with the blare of a siren, and she stood back to watch as the mechanics stuttered and shifted into life, her throat constricting as the door was pulled from its housing and rolled away.

“This is it? Not a dream. But… The start of my new life?”

Sammie Hartwell gulped, readjusted her grip on her looted pistol, and took her first toward the world above.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first time posting any of my writing to the public outside of TES role play blogs, so, uh, yeah. I hope you’ve enjoyed the start!
> 
> Also, no, you didn’t misread anything because Shaun is indeed adopted in this story. There are a number of reasons for this, the least of which is my tokophobia: I'm going for a number of deep, over-arching themes with this series of fics, and this is relevant to the most central of them all.


	2. Into the Light

Today Sammie learned that years underground – whether that was a couple of dozen or… Two hundred – didn’t do well for your vision.

She had to shield her eyes when the vault entrance opened and sunlight streamed in from above, and she remained with her hands over her face and eyes scrunched closed for a good couple of minutes even after the lift ground to a halt. Adjusting back to the daylight was a slow process of peeling one finger back at a time, a lot of squinting and a lot of blinking, but once she was able to keep her eyelids open without pain it instead became a battle to close them again.

The sky was so… Clear. Just an endless vista of pale blue that stretched to the horizon and beyond, a shadow of the somehow still-recognisable skyline of downtown Boston framed against it far to the south. Sammie felt the air fill her lungs, crisper than she remembered: It raised a question about whether that was due to being cooped up in the vault for so long, or because factories that were shut down long ago could no longer pump out clouds of smog.

Sammie just took in the distant caricature of the city for a moment, bewildered. She had expected something more akin to… She didn’t know. A desert? Flying cars to whizz above? A world rotting away and reclaimed by nature?

Not unnaturally still silence that was somehow pretty.

And _certainly_ not the knowledge that you could only call it ‘pretty’ if you kept looking up and into the distance, instead of examining the gut-wrenching reality of what was immediately surrounding you.

The vault elevator was worn and rusted, surrounded by weeds and dead grass that crunched underfoot. The chain-link fence that surrounded the entrance was still intact in some places, rusting away in others and completely choked with a tangle of vines, and construction equipment creaked where it stood. Trees were still standing, but judging by the lack of leaves they weren’t doing much else, and the remains of Sanctuary could be seen through them down a rockier section of hill to the south. Picking across the landing, Sammie even made out a couple more skeletons and her lips turned down at the thought of their final moments, watching that blast wave rush towards them while the elevator disappeared, just out of reach.

So much loss. And what for? One stinking little oil reserve, when a future of limitless, clean fusion energy had been _just_ around the corner?

She kicked a tin can across the ground, once more noting the silence once it clattered to a rest by the gate that lead back to Sanctuary Hills. Well, there was no use in dawdling here: She needed to find people before nightfall, or at least see if her house was still intact and able to provide adequate shelter.

The small path that had once connected Vault 111’s entrance with Sanctuary was overgrown to the point of being unrecognisable, but a bridge that passed over the little rivulet that ran between them was still standing. Sammie tiptoed across it in case it wasn’t as structurally sound as it looked, then sidestepped to crouch by the stream, opened up the latch of her Pip-Boy and started splashing and scrubbing at the inside of the plastic housing, careful to avoid water leaking into any cracks or the speakers.

When the internal Geiger counter started crackling, Sammie jumped and _scrambled_ back away from the shore.

“Shit! Really? The water’s radioactive?” She stared at the river, then at her wet hands, then hastily placed the Pip-Boy on the ground and shook the water off. Skin cancer was probably the least of her worries right now, but a bad sign was still a bad sign: She was going to need to drink sooner rather than later, and radioactive material became orders of magnitude more dangerous if it got inside of you. Sammie was just going to have to hope that other water sources she came across weren’t contaminated.

The town itself wasn’t much less quiet than the forest trail had been. The only sound was her own light footsteps against the pavement, or the occasional wooden clunk of a door or window shutter swinging in the wind. It seemed there wasn’t a single window in the entire neighbourhood that hadn’t shattered, and crunching glass underfoot when she passed them by startled Sammie more than once.

“As I _live_ and _breathe_!”

Though not as much as a modulated British accent suddenly breaking the silence, three waving metal eyes poking out from behind a door frame with their camera-like apertures sliding fully open in shock.

“Mrs Hartwell? _Is that really you_?!”

Sammie’s own eyes widened.

“Codsworth?! You’re… You’re still here?”

“Well of course I’m still here!” the robot responded, then whizzed out the door and up to her, “Surely you don’t think a little radiation could deter the pride of General Atomics International? But _you_ seem the worse for wear... Best not let the hubby see you in that state! …Where is sir, by the way?”

“They… I… Codsworth. He’s… Not coming.”

“Ma’am? These things you’re saying. These… Terrible things. I… I believe you need a distraction! Yes! A distraction, to calm this dire mood!” The robot proceeded to launch into a ramble about setting up a game of checkers or organising a playdate for Shaun, failing to take note of the shadow that was deepening across Sammie’s features. It was only when she didn’t reply to his plans that his steam petered out, and he hovered in place for a moment. “Is… Is the lad, er, with you?”

“No, he’s not. He’s been _kidnapped_ , Codsworth! But… I’m going to find him. I’m going to get my baby back, and teach those _miscreants_ who took him a lesson!”

“Oh. It’s worse than I thought,” Codsworth stated somewhat bluntly, and Sammie almost snapped at him because _of course_ it was, but he continued talking before she could. “You’re suffering from hunger-induced paranoia! Not eating properly for two hundred years will do that, I’m afraid!”

Sammie felt her stomach sink. Did he just say two hundred years? Her gaze twitched down to the Pip-Boy still air-drying in her hands and back up again. “No. No, that’s not possible.” The words tumbled out of her mouth, and yet she couldn’t believe them as the evidence against them continued to pile up. “I wasn’t out for that long… Not _two hundred_ years…”

“A bit over two hundred _and ten_ actually, ma’am! …Give or take a little for the Earth’s rotation, and some minor dings to the ole’ chronometer. And that means you’re, ah… Two centuries late for dinner! Ha-hah! Perhaps I can whip you up a snack? You must be famished!”

It wasn’t clear whether Codsworth was serious or trying to crack a joke. Even if the latter, Sammie was in no state to be laughing. “Food? I, ah… Yeah, sure. I just… Need a minute to–”

“To find the family, yes, I know!” Yet another ‘mood swing’ saw the Mister Handy cut her off, bobbing up and down on the spot with newfound eagerness. “Shall we search the neighbourhood together, then? Sir and young Shaun may turn up yet!”

“Codsworth…” Sammie started, but hesitated. What could she say to get the message through to him, that she hadn’t tried already?

“Just give the word ma’am, and I’ll initiate my search protocols!”

She stared at him for a while, running a hand through her hair and frowning, then finally sighed in defeat. “Alright, then. Lead the way.”

Codsworth spun around on the spot and took off for the house next door without a word, only undulating his limbs as an indication of his approval to her agreement. Sammie latched the Pip-Boy back onto her wrist before following, and retrieved her pistol from beneath her arm just in case there were more of those cockroaches about. Except this time it wasn’t a giant cockroach that greeted her when she peeped into a hallway.

“Juliet Charlie!” Sammie yelled, firing almost blindly at the rapidly darting giant black blob and missing every time until Codsworth pushed past and roasted the entire immediate vicinity with his flamethrower. Only once the heat died down did Sammie uncover her face and inspect the charred corpse.

“Hrmm… Nothing here but a few flies,” Codsworth commented, and Sammie stared incredulously. Great, as if mutated super-roaches weren’t bad enough, there were also flies here, too! But a very different question came more immediately to mind.

“What the hell, Codsworth? I don’t remember your flame being _that_ intense!” In fact, she didn’t remember it being capable of (or needed for) much more than boiling a pot of water.

“Well, some self-modifications have been necessary to stay in top operational condition in this world now, ma’am!” Codsworth replied matter-of-factly, then two of his eyestalks unexpectedly turned back to the house’s entrance. “Wait. My sensors are picking up movement in another house! Follow me!”

And then he was off once more. Sammie jogged to keep up and was finding it even harder to gather her thoughts on this whole ordeal, let alone get the chance to speak. The robot was acting strange, almost as if he were _trying_ to keep them busy and prevent her from getting a moment to say anything. Two more roasted flies and one exploded by a bullet later, and he stopped to float in place for a long moment.

“Mrs… Ms Hartwell?” _Ms_ Hartwell. Sammie got a feeling she knew where this was going. “The family isn’t here either. They’re… _They’re really gone_ , aren’t they?”

The pain in his vocal output was astonishingly genuine, and Sammie had to blink rapidly lest her own composure disappear again. “That’s what I’ve been trying to say this whole time you’ve been acting so weirdly. It’s… It’s just you and me, now.”

“I… I… Oh ma’am! It’s been just _horrible_! Two centuries with no one to talk to, no one to serve!” Codsworth actually dropped a foot in altitude from his motor stuttering, and the proverbial floodgates tore open: The machine spiralled into a depressingly heartfelt tirade, recounting the tribulations of surviving and trying to keep Sammie’s home maintained over the decades in her family’s absence. Especially gut-wrenching was his closing statement: “The bombs came, and all of you left in a such a hurry! I thought for certain that you and your family were… Well, were dead. Except then you showed up out of the blue, and I thought that… That maybe things could finally go back to normal!”

Sammie had given up on trying to keep her own waterworks back long before this point, and wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I’m sorry, Codsworth. I really am, but the truth is… I don’t think normal is something that exists anymore.”

They stood in silence for a bit, which Codsworth eventually broke once the frequency of Sammie’s sniffling lessened.

“…That reminds me. I did find this holotape,” he said, whipping around his pincer arm to pull a small orange cartridge from his casing, “I believe sir was going to present it to you. As a– As a surprise. But then, well… Everything happened. I know it’s not much but, maybe it could serve as a reminder, ma’am. Of… Of ‘normal’.”

Sammie considered the tape being held before her, knowing full well that as soon as she listened to it she would be dooming herself to an extended session of undignified sobbing. She accepted it into her hand regardless, and slid it into a pocket in her suit. “Well… It’s something, at least. But… We should probably stop feeling sorry for ourselves now. Think of what to do next?”

“Alright,” Codsworth responded. “How about we return home, then? Surely it’ll be easier to make plans once you’ve had something to eat and drink. Besides, I’ve been needing an excuse to fire up the condensation collector again!”

Oh yeah, that was right. All standard Mister Handy units had a small condensation collector and purifier built-in, so at least that was the drinking water problem solved. Sammie nodded, and gestured for him to lead the way. “While I’m not feeling particularly hungry, that sounds good. I think I’m going to need to find all of the supplies I can get, anyway.”

So human and robot returned home, neither mentioning a word other than making their immediate plans for fear that it might trigger emotions that they simple wasn’t prepared to deal with right now, while Sammie rummaged through her old kitchen and living room. A decision was ultimately made for Sammie to investigate Concord while Codsworth kept the home front under guard, and a sad fact was discovered about the passage of time and how most valuables tended to disappear in the hands of scavengers in spite of a robot’s best efforts at home defence.

But hey, at least Sammie was able to find Nate’s old military-issue backpack and sleeping bag. Being able to carry as much as she could with her would be vital to lasting more than a few days out here, and the lightweight, mind-bogglingly warm, and highly compressible fabric of the sleeping bag was of a far greater quality than anything you could buy in a store, let alone happen to luck upon.

Pulling it on and adjusting the straps for the bag and its contents – a TV dinner so crammed full of preservatives that it was still edible, a tin of water that didn’t trigger the Pip-Boy’s Geiger counter, and some basic cooking utensils – to sit comfortably on her slimmer frame, Sammie told Codsworth she’d try to be back by sundown, and then ventured off into the wasteland that her world had become.

 

* * *

 

It was surreal, really.

Everything was just… Dead. Nothing but brown and grey as far as the eye could see while Sammie meandered her way down the road, the pistol loose and far less reassuring than it should have been in her fingers. More than _two hundred years_ had supposedly passed, and yet the landscape looked no better than if the bombs had fallen mere weeks ago: trees, all stripped bare of any leaves like those back near the vault, rose like wooden skeletons along the edge of the street, billboards and signs were ominous shapes on the horizon, and piles of rubble littered the bitumen wherever it wasn’t unrecognisable for the pot holes riddling it.

If it weren’t for Codsworth’s insistence that he had seen people down in Concord, Sammie very well could have believed she was the last person alive on Earth.

A screech to the left and Sammie jumped, flinging her pistol and firing off a shot before she even properly registered what was going on. Rather than the sight of a giant insect exploding in a shower of goo and ichor, however, she was greeted to a crow taking off while squawking wildly in shock at the sound of the gunshot.

“ _Get yourself together, woman!_ ” Panting, Sammie grit her teeth and frowned until her heartbeat steadied back out at a more reasonable rate. There was no use in trying to find something resembling civilisation if she was just going to go and accidentally shoot the first person she saw because her trigger finger was faster than her eyes. Also there was the issue of ammo, she noted glumly, looking down at the single spare clip she had left, somehow forced into one of the few too-tight pockets that her too-tight suit possessed.

 _Clearly_ Vault-Tec’s clothing designers had been men.

Clicking her tongue and muttering to herself, Sammie Hartwell kept walking. If her guestimate was right she should be able to reach the town square in about half an hour, and if she was lucky the truck stop on the way might still be intact. An old service station would be exactly the sort of place to look for tools or something that could be improvised into ammo or a backup weapon.

As luck would have it, Sammie turned out to be right.

Rounding one of the very few bends in the road between Sanctuary and Concord, Sammie let out a sigh of relief at the familiar spire of the Red Rocket franchise’s distinctive rooftop ornamentation and broke out into a jog. Upon getting closer she slowed back down and readied her pistol, it was better to be safe than sorry, even though she was praying that she wouldn’t have to use any more of her precious little ammo.

Fortunately for her, cautiously creeping up to where the coolant pumps were helped to ground her enough to look before shooting when she spotted movement again.

That was doubly fortunate for the dog that turned to face her.

“Huh,” Sammie commented and relaxed, lowering the pistol and standing up as she stepped out from behind the pump. Sammie had never been much of a dog person – it was Nate who had always turned into a blubbering, baby-talking mess when one showed up – but the dog stood still long enough, considering her with a surprising scrutiny with its head tilted to the side, that even she could tell it was probably a German Shepherd or whatever type of mutated mutt could still pass for one.

Sammie really hoped it wouldn’t attack. She wasn’t sure she could ever bring herself to shoot a dog, even if in self-defence.

The dog suddenly barked and ran towards her, causing Sammie to flinch, but the lope of its step and the wagging of its tail said she had nothing to fear.

“Hey there,” Sammie smiled and got down on one knee, tentatively holding up her free hand for the dog to sniff only for it to skip formalities and go straight to butting its – er, his – head against her in a request for a pat. Sammie snorted and obliged. “Well, you certainly know exactly what you want. Where’s your owner, boy?”

That was met with another tilt of the head and a whine that Sammie could have sworn sounded like confusion, but who was she to tell? It wasn’t like the dog could understand her anyway. Something they had in common, now that she thought about it.

When the dog suddenly went stiff and bounced away to start growling at the service station with its fur up on end, Sammie formerly retracted her thought. _That_ was something she could definitely understand, and with a sharp intake of breath she had her weapon out front once more.

“What is it, boy?” she asked, and then immediately wandered why she had bothered talking to the dog that couldn’t understand her, let alone give a useful answer. Well, weirder things had happened. Like being _cryogenically frozen_ and waking up to a post-nuclear waste-

_Bhwatch!_

“SCRRREEEE!”

Sammie screeched almost as loudly as the– the– _thing_ that erupted out of the sealed road surface like it was nothing more than loose topsoil. Meanwhile, the dog reacted faster (or, rather, reacted _at all_ ), charging forwards with a vicious snarl and crashing into the creature teeth-first, latching on and trying to rip it apart. Sammie hesitated, unable to get a clear shot without taking the risk of shooting the dog instead, only to be presented with two more targets that burst from underground closer to the main building.

Her first shot went low and sparked uselessly against a curb, but the second hit its mark and one of the pink, squishy mini-monsters tumbled head-over-hindquarters, blood spraying from a new hole in its back. While that body slumped in a heap, the other leapt at her, and Sammie jumped back with a curse to avoid a set – _two sets?_ – of teeth clamping down for her arm. Carried by its own momentum the creature sailed past, and Sammie made sure of that by bringing up her knee and slamming it with as much force as she could focus into her foot.

The thing squealed as it slammed into the coolant price sign with a clang, dropped to the ground, and immediately scampered as fast as it could for the other side of the road via a roundabout, disoriented trajectory, and then there was silence.

Sammie immediately spun about to check on the dog, who turned out to be sitting on his hindquarters, looking up at her with a massive chunk of flesh hanging out of the side of his mouth like a trophy. Sammie sighed, then nudged the throat-less corpse next to him with her foot, grimacing.

“What the hell…” After seeing what had happened to cockroaches and flies she really shouldn’t have been surprised to find giant rats, but giant _naked mole-_ rats? Had the bomb somehow landed on top of some kid’s school science project? It was becoming more and more apparent that she needed to arm herself more effectively – and soon – because the world had officially gone to hell in a handbasket. Speaking of which, she chose to ignore the dog attempting to hook a tooth into and tug on her pant leg, trotting around the side of the truck stop and peering into the garage.

The dog whined, but followed nonetheless, sniffing about the workshop while Sammie started rummaging through every unlocked container she could find. It wasn’t long before the logical conclusion that someone else had already looted the place set in and her hopes started falling, and by the end of her stint in overturning boxes and flinging open cupboards all she had to show for it was an old issue of Grognak the Barbarian and half a roll of duct tape.

Weighing up one in either hand, Sammie pouted. Well, at least she could use them in tandem as an improvised bandage should the need arise, and she winced as she ripped out a few pages of the comic (and the heart of her inner still-in-college nerd) to stuff into her pack alongside the tape.

The dog barked for about the fifteenth time since Sammie had started scavenging, so she finally gave in and turned to him with a huff.

“Okay, what is it? You’ve got my attention now,” she said, watching as the dog anxiously paced by the roller door and occasionally stuck his head out. He paused and stared at her for a moment, then glanced back out the door and ran for it before circling back around, bowing his head with ears perked up, eyeing her. Sammie frowned, trying to decipher his body language.

“Do you want me to follow? Is that it?” It was a wild guess, but it was as good as any.

Much to her surprise, he barked excitedly and ran out.

“He-eey! Wait a minute!” Sammie bolted after him, rounding the coolant station and catching up to the dog, who had stopped to make sure she was following before pointing with his nose down the road.

In the direction of Concord. 

“Hrmm…” Sammie thought for a moment, and then shrugged. “Well, alright. I’m going in that direction anyway, but we need to be back here by nightfall, okay?”

The dog just barked again and bounded off again, thankfully at a pace she could keep up with.


	3. A Dog's Dinner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sammie finally finds those people Codsworth told her about... But that doesn't necessarily mean her situation is going to improve any time soon. This is also where things start deviating from the in-game script.
> 
> Rating has gone up in this chapter because now we're starting to see some proper head-smashing.

“Look at me… Not even a day into the apocalypse, and I’m taking orders from a dog.”

Sammie’s voice felt flat as she followed the dog sniffing his way through the ruins of Concord, and never mind that her statement was technically incorrect, because _everything_ felt flat: Concord was just as barren and desolated as the service station and Sanctuary Hills before it. There were some more signs of life, mainly crows watching her and the dog from rooftop perches, but that was hardly a comfort considering the species’ penchant for congregating around sites of death and decay.

As well as living, breathing things, Concord was also home to significantly more colour than the rest of the landscape she had seen so far. It was downright astonishing that the red, white, and blue decorations had survived all of this time, but rather than brighten up the otherwise bleak picture the town painted, they only served to weigh Sammie’s shoulders down with the knowledge that they were tied with the speech Nate had been supposed to deliver at the veteran’s hall tonight.

…That night. That night two hundred years ago.

A bark broke Sammie from her reverie, and she readied her pistol in case the dog’s reasoning was another mutated animal somewhere.

Instead, she lowered her weapon.

It was a person.

A real, bona-fide, flesh-and-blood _person_!

The woman, dressed in old leathers criss-crossed with improvised scrap metal armour, must have walked out from between two houses ahead of them when the dog spotted her, and had been reaching for her hip holster until Sammie directed her own gun away. She frowned at Sammie and the dog for a moment, checked her six-o’-clock, and then relaxed and started walking over. Sammie beamed widely and had to devote a lot of effort to just walk to meet the other lady instead if breaking into a full-on sprint.

She was so relieved to find another human being that she didn’t notice the dog tense up, ears flattening against the back of his head.

“Hello! Oh gosh, you have no idea how glad I am to see you. I was starting to think there wasn’t anyone left here!” Sammie stopped on the opposite side of the house’s surprisingly intact picket fence, and the other woman paused for a moment to wrestle with the gate before chuckling.

“Bloody hell. You and me both: _I_ was starting to think there weren’t any Vault Dwellers left,” she said, scratching the back of her head and glancing Sammie up and down. Sammie blinked, not sure of what to say next: She couldn’t go and just straight-up ask for supplies, because for all she knew her new acquaintance was just as low-stocked as she was. She decided to start with the basics and ask for a name.

“So, might I ask your–?”

“Oi, that’s a Pip-Boy, right?” This lady wasn’t even looking Sammie in the eye, instead staring at her left arm with wide eyes.

“Er, yeah? What of it?” Sammie frowned. How rude. Looks like basic manners hadn’t survived total atomic annihilation.

“It looks good on you!” She grinned and laughed, and Sammie awkwardly chuckled along with her.

“You… You think so?” If this was what basic conversation had devolved into, Sammie was starting to think that she’d be better off talking to the dog.

“Clashes horribly with the suit, though…” The woman shook her head and tutted, then eyed Sammie for a long moment. Suddenly, she felt a lot less comfortable than she had a moment ago, and her instincts were confirmed when the other lady suddenly sneered: “I bet it’d look a lot better on me!”

“ _Shit!_ ” Sammie brought up her pistol just as the other woman moved to fire hers, a gunshot rang in her ears, and for a gut-wrenching moment Sammie thought she had been had. Only there was no blossoming of white-hot pain or numb shock through her body, only frenzied cursing and screaming as the other woman fought to free her arm from the dog’s jaws, her cobbled-together, sorry excuse for a gun clattering to the floor.

The fight-or-flight response kicked in, and months of training and trudging through the Alaskan tundra said fight.

A second gunshot assaulted Sammie’s ears, and the woman in the vault suit wasn’t the one who crumpled to the ground. The dog let go and licked his chops, watching Sammie curiously, while all she could do was sigh and flex her jaw to encourage the tenseness in her neck away.

“Great, just great,” Sammie spat, crossing her arms, “it’s just like all those terrible zombie movies Nate always watched! Everyone who’s managed to stay alive _is_ alive because they’re only looking out for them… Selves?”

Mid-rant, Sammie frowned. She wasn’t entirely sure if what she could now hear was more gunfire or if her ears were somehow replaying echoes on loop. She decided to risk a glance at the dog, and indeed he was staring in the direction the noise was coming from, one ear quirked upright and the other flicking about. Sammie felt the back of her neck prickle, and started looking for the best way to go about sneaking away, or at least to a more defensible location.

Or she would have, if the dog hadn’t barked at the top of its lungs and lunged through the gate and front yard that the bandit had come from, sprinting straight down the side ally in a hurry.

“Oh, g– Argh!” Sammie squeezed the grip on her pistol, groaned, and then ran after him. Damn her conscience that couldn’t let a dog run off and get itself killed!

Around the corner, Sammie poked her head out into the main street to find it was a miniature warzone. A lot less yelling and screaming, but it held the image nonetheless – there were bodies sprawled about whilst the remaining combatants were holed up in whatever cover they could find while exchanging potshots. There was one by a car just further down the street from Sammie, and she weighed up whether she should change her pistol’s magazine now rather than risk having to reload after they were alerted to her pres– Oh, wait. Never mind. The dog just charged straight at him.

“Take this, you pompous slouch hat– OoaoOOww!” The man was dragged down by the arm just as he moved to take a shot over the old Fusion Flea’s bonnet, and Sammie scrambled forward to put him down before he could pistol-whip the dog in retaliation.

“Dammit, boy! Surely there’s a safer place we could be elsewhere!” Sammie growled at the dog, who just stared back up at his with his mouth wide and his tongue lolling out in response. A bullet ricocheting off of the car door said there was no time for further scolding, Sammie quickly ducking in behind it with a yelp, closer to the house it had been crashed into for god-knows how long.

“Oi! They must’ve called in backup! Look out!” Someone yelled and made a break for Sammie’s position, only to be engulfed in a flare of red and disintegrated before she could line up a shot on him. Sammie blinked and the dog barked again, this time sounding excited rather than aggressive, running about in a circle to try and push Sammie out from her cover. She half-stumbled in her effort to avoid being knocked over before he ran out again, this time straight down the main street.

“I’m gonna get you this time, ya’ mangy mutt!” It was a female voice this time, who ran at the dog brandishing a tire iron. Sammie swore, and yet again shot before she lined up her sights properly, predictably missing. The woman almost immediately changed directions to go for the more immediate threat of the person with a gun, screaming angrily at the top of her lungs, but charging in a straight line just made her an easier target and she was appropriately dispatched.

Sammie didn’t have time to be confused by her lack of self-preservation efforts, because a fourth hostile was spinning around to see what all the commotion from behind was all about. With a sharp intake of breath Sammie slung her own gun around and pulled the trigger, only for nothing to happen.

Under less life-threatening circumstances, she would have facepalmed.

“Hah! You’re all out! Now let’s see what–” another thunder-crack blared and a blast of red flew through the man, sending him spinning like a top momentarily before his body hit the floor, leaving the only sound to be the faint crackle of burning flesh. Sammie took to loading her last clip into the pistol as fast as she could.

“Hey! Up here! On the balcony!” Yet another voice, and Sammie almost shot in the direction it came from before she realised that the balcony – Oh, hey, it was the Museum of Freedom! – was where the lasers had come from. The fact that the man yelling down at her wasn’t holding his weapon at the ready suggested that this might just be the first semi-friendly face she’d seen since leaving the vault, so Sammie lowered her own gun and listened. “I’ve got a group of settlers inside, and the raiders are almost through the door! Grab that laser musket and help us! _Please!_ ”

His words were punctuated by a bark, and Sammie’s eyes darted back to the dog. It was almost jittering on the spot – anxious, Sammie realised – next to the body of a man wearing a similar outfit to the one on the balcony, lain over the stairs to the museum entrance. What appeared to be a laser rifle which had been subjected to the duct-tape-and-sticks maintenance regime was on the floor next to him.

It hit Sammie right then: This must be the dog’s owner, and why he had been so insistent that she follow him. He had been looking for _help_.

“Alright! But I _swear_ if any of you try to shoot me–!”

“That’s not gonna happen! Just please! They won’t expect anyone to come in from behind!” The desperation in his voice was palpable, so Sammie nodded and jogged to follow the dog. She paused by the body for a moment, considering the… Laser musket or whatever he had called it, then quickly holstered her pistol to grab the unwieldy weapon, giving it an experimental heft and once-over as she shouldered her way through the door. At this point, she didn’t have enough ammo to be picky.

The first thing Sammie became aware of after entering the building was yelling, banging, and a door repeatedly slamming up and to her left. Looking for the source of the commotion, Sammie thought she made out a couple of the raiders on the other side of the third floor’s railing, but the dog ran across to a room on the other side of the entrance hall. Rather than shoot now, she just followed – the dog probably had a better idea of how to get upstairs than she did, considering just how much the place had deteriorated. There was even a freaking _vertibird_ wedged through one of the walls for crying out loud!

Her first opportunity to test out the laser musket came soon after, when she took a shot at the back of an inattentive guard’s head through a doorway. Confused, she pulled the trigger again, and when still nothing happened, she ducked back behind the door frame and gave the musket a closer look.

“ _Ooohhh… So that’s it_ ,” she thought, with a grunt when she finally found that the crank lever on the side charged up the capacitor in the place of microfusion cells. Clever.

The next time she pulled the trigger, the result was much more dramatic.

“Okay, _now_ this is something I can work with.” Satisfied with the body slumping to the floor, Sammie nodded to the dog. “Now, let’s go find your master!”

As predicted, the raiders indeed hadn’t expected anyone hostile to them to appear from the rear, and every time Sammie and the dog got the jump on them anything resembling a strategy fell apart. If anything, the decrepit state of the building did more to hinder their progress, closely followed by Sammie’s ineffectiveness with the musket: The cranking took a while to get used to, and the extended barrel made it more difficult to aim in the close quarters than she remembered an AER9 being, but between the dog’s help to hold enemies still and the fact she wasn’t using up ammunition, it was well worth the awkwardness of this initial breaking-in period.

“PEEK-A-BOO!”

Her turning of the final corner was announced with the sound of the door breaking off of its hinges and screams from the other side. Sammie balked, and unloaded a shot into one of the raiders’ backs as she and her compatriots barged through the door with bellows of glee. Another red flash said that the man from the balcony was shooting from the other side, and soon the taunts and cheers turned to curses and squeals when the raiders realised that they had been flanked and caught between two separate lines of fire.

When the last body slumped into the pile in the doorway, Sammie, too, slumped against the wall. That had been far too close.

There was a surprisingly comfortable moment of silence once the violence had died down, but all good things must come to an end.

“Man, I don’t know who you are, but your timing’s impeccable.” Judging by the voice, it was the guy from on the balcony, and looking up once she had taken a chance to breathe confirmed Sammie’s suspicions.

“Ah…” Sammie swallowed, watching the dog pick across the corpses crammed into the doorway while she gathered her thoughts. “About two hundred years too late, but alright?”

The man’s face fell blank in confusion, as did another guy in a welder’s outfit who had crept up to a terminal by the door to peer through at her.

“Uh… Huh…” There was another beat of silence, which Sammie used to step over the bodies and into the room, nose wrinkling. The man coughed and held up a hand. “Well, ah, anyway. Preston Garvey, Commonwealth Minuteman. You have no idea how pleased I am meet you.”

Now it was Sammie’s turn to stare blankly.

“Minuteman? Oh, so now I’m travelling _backwards_ in time?” At her disbelieving jab, the man’s hand fell back to his side.

“I’m not sure what you’re getting at, but since it looks like you’re from one of those vaults, I guess you haven’t heard of us? The whole idea behind it was to “protect the people at a minute’s notice”, and we did, but… Things fell apart,” Preston offered as some sort of explanation, eyes scanning Sammie up and down. “Now it looks like I’m the last one left standing. But… That’s not important right now. We need to figure out how to get out of here.”

“Can’t we just walk out?” Sammie pointed a thumb over her shoulder, “Your dog and I did just kill all those guys.”

“Oooohh. I’m afraid not,” the other man spoke up this time, waving his hands in front of him, “I’ve seen their leader, and he ain’t one of those guys painting the doorframe right now. The rest of them’ll be waiting for us, no doubt about it.”

Sammie fought down the urge to groan. So this was what the world was like, now? She was almost wishing the vault was still functional so she could just go back and re-freeze herself.

“Alright, then,” she said half-heartedly, only now bothering to scan over the rest of the room. As well as the two men by the door, there was an older lady watching her from a couch and a young couple huddled in a corner, both pale and watching her nervously. “Just, might I quickly ask: Who are you people? I’m Sammie. By the way. Sammie Hartwell.”

Preston nodded solemnly.

“Just some folks looking for a new home, a fresh start. I’ve been protecting ‘em since Quincy.” Sammie felt her eyebrows pop: That was a long distance to walk, but she didn’t interrupt. “Lexington looked like a good spot for a while, but the ghouls drove us outta’ there before too long. And it seems everywhere we go it’s the same story. A month ago there were twenty of us, yesterday, eight… Now it just the five of us here. Me, the Longs: Marcy and Jun,” he gestured towards the pair in the corner, and then to the old lady who was now petting the dog, “that’s old Mama Murphy on the couch, and this here’s Sturges.”

“Howdy,” Sturges added, but Sammie didn’t hear what he had to say next, because she was already asking another question.

“…Ghouls? What’s a ghoul?”

“Wow. You _really_ aren’t from around here, are you?” Preston balked, then cleared his throat with an apology, “Ghouls are… People who’ve been irradiated. Most are just like you and me, they just look pretty messed up and live a long time, but they’re still just… People.” He shrugged as best he could without putting his musket down, and Sammie nodded slowly as she pieced together what he was saying. It looked like more than just the local wildlife had been mutated. “The ones I’m talking about are different, though. The radiation’s rotted their brains, made them feral. They’re the ones you have to watch out for, because they’ll rip you apart just as soon as look at you.”

“Soon _er_ , sometimes,” Sturges added nonchalantly, glancing over his shoulder from where he had now sat down in front of the terminal, flickering green betraying the computer’s miraculous survival of the past two centuries. “Might want to think about cutting that hair o’ yours if you’re planning to keep wandering about like this.” He nodded and gestured vaguely at the back of his head, and Sammie lifted her own hand to run it through the copper frizz about her shoulders, not sure what to make of this.

“ _Anyway_ ,” the Minuteman stressed through gritted teeth, “We figured Concord would be a safe place to settle. Those raiders proved us wrong. And here we are.”

“That’s terrible,” having finally found her voice, though not much else, Sammie offered her condolences. Yep, this world could officially bite her arse.

“It’s just a fact of life in the Commonwealth, I’m afraid. But, all isn’t lost yet: We do have one idea left,” a hint of something resembling hope played at the corners of Preston’s eyes, and he nodded back to Sturges. “ _Now_ you can talk.”

Sturges smirked, then patted the terminal.

“There’s a crashed vertibird up on the roof. Old school, pre-war tech. You might’ve seen it on the way up, in fact.”

“Oh yeah, the one that’s taking up the half the building? It took me a while, but I found it,” Sammie snarked, and Sturges laughed.

“I know I’m gonna like you already. Anyway, one of its passengers left behind a seriously sweet goody.” He lowered his voice, as if it was some sort of big secret. “Get this: A full suit of cherry T-45 Power Armour. _Military issue_.”

Now Sammie knew she was going to like him, too. The sarcasm from her grin disappeared as quickly as giddy optimism spread through her veins.

“Did you just say Power Armour?”

“Oh god. They really don’t teach you anything down in those vaults, do they?” Preston interjected, his voice awash with disbelief.

“Gosh! No!” Sammie was quick to clear the air before they started thinking she was _totally_ clueless, “I know what Power Armour is, I was just checking to make sure I didn’t mishear. Because right now, finding out that the best thing I’ve heard in _years_ isn’t true, would probably kill me.”

Preston sighed in relief, and Sturges laughed again. He was a surprisingly chipper guy for someone in his current situation.

“See? I thought that might be some of the best news you’ve heard in a while. Protection’s hard to come around these days, especially when it comes with an added bonus: If one of us gets that suit, they should be able to rip the minigun right off the vertibird. Do that, and any raiders who think about backing up their friends here get an express ticket to Hell. You dig?”

“Oooohhh, I dig alright!” Sammie couldn’t contain her excitement now.

“Good! Just one problem: We need to reactivate the suit first. I’ve already had a look, and it’s totally out of juice. Probably has been for a hundred years.”

“Hmm… Nate always said the T-45 series had that problem…” Sammie muttered, but she didn’t want to kill the mood completely, not when they were so close to something resembling a workable plan. So she tried to stir some optimism back up: “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it has been _way_ too long since I’ve donned one of those suits. Sure, it might not be T-51, but I’d say this a good bet. We have to try.”

“ _You’ve_ used T-51 before? D-don’t make me laugh!” All eyes turned to the other side of the room: Someone else had decided to speak up. Marcy Long to be exact. “You only find that stuff in old military bunkers! F-filled to the brim with, killer robots!”

“Marcy, p– please. Not now,” Jun stuttered, his voice barely audible.

“She’s gotta’ be lying! You’re lying, right?” Marcy shot a look back at Sammie, who attempted to cobble together a response but the other woman was yelling again before she could even think. “What could you have possibly done in that vault suit, huh? _Bleed to death?!_ ”

Sammie’s eye’s widened. “Oh shit. You’ve got a point.”

“Yeah! Exactly! I– Wait, what–?” Now it was Marcy’s turn to trip over her words, but Sammie didn’t care to listen. She was already too busy pushing some of the dead raiders out of the door, starting to strip their improvised armour as best she could. Even with the prospect of Power Armour on the table, she needed protection, and this was most immediate source of some.

“Good idea!” She heard Sturges say, followed by furious typing, “You get all geared up and I’ll see if I can get the security gate at the back of the museum open. The fusion core keeping all the exhibits and everything in here powered should be in the basement somewhere, and there’s a big hole leading in there right behind it. But…”

Trying to fit a road sign that had been beaten into the shape of a shoulderpad, Sammie rolled her eyes. “There’s always a “but”…”

“Look: I fix stuff. I tinker. But bypassing security ain’t exactly my forte.” The typing stopped, and Sammie felt Sturges’ gaze on the back of her neck. “You could give it a shot, though.”

“Sorry, but no dice. Unless there’s a password lying about here I’d be even more useless at it than you,” Sammie finished adjusting a leather strap to hold the guard in place over her left shoulder, and started sliding a plastic tube with bits of barbed wire sticking out over her other arm, “I’ve only ever dealt with computers when the security was there to protect _my_ journals, not stop me from reading them.”

“Well, alright then…” The disappointment in Preston’s voice was like a punch in the gut, and even though Sammie knew that she had already done more for this group than anyone else they had encountered in weeks, finally encountering people who weren’t going to just shoot her on sight only to be unable to help further still brought up a twist of guilt. “Guess we’ll have to come up with some other way in. Just when it looked like our luck was starting to turn around, too.”

“Ey, c’mon now, we’ll figure something out,” Sturges said, and then started listing off some ideas for how to break through the security gate. Meanwhile, Sammie focused on doing up the last straps to hold on a shin guard that she assumed had once been used by a footballer, then stood back up to test her mobility now that she was kitted out.

In all honesty, the improvised armour didn’t make her _feel_ any safer, but that probably wouldn’t continue to be the case once she found a chest piece of some sort and something to cover her head with. The road sign did have the benefit of covering her heart at least, but the downside was that it dug into her upper arm whenever she attempted to aim down the sights of the laser musket, or even just point it out in front of her.

Alas, it would have to do for now.

“Dogmeat sure did find us some help… Just look at ya’ now.” Distracted from her fussiness, Sammie blinked and looked up to see the old lady addressing her from her seat on the couch. What had Preston said her name was again? Mama Murphy? Yes, that had to be it.

“…Dogmeat?” Sammie parroted, then she held up a finger when what she had said registered. “Oohhh, I see. So he’s your dog, then?”

Mama Murphy’s eyes widened, and she quickly shook her head. “Oh, no no. He ain’t my dog. No sir-ee!” Her expression softened, and she glanced down at the dog who was now laying by her feet before focusing again on Sammie. “Dogmeat… He’s what you’d call his own man. You can’t own a free spirit like that: _He_ chooses _his_ friends, and he sticks with ‘em. And he’ll stay by you now. I saw it.”

“You… ‘Saw it’?” Sammie deadpanned, and judging by the look she got back, Mama Murphy got that a lot.

“Oh, I know what you’re thinking. ‘This old lady, she’s out of her mind!’ But it’s the chems. They give ole’ Mama Murphy the Sight,” she said with a sly grin, the skin about her eyes crinkling genuinely. Sammie weighed up her options for a moment, sparing a glance at Preston and Sturges who were now quite deeply engrossed in a thankfully-civil argument over the merits of trying to cobble together both laser muskets into some kind of super-musket that might have a chance of melting the lock mechanism in the gate. Knowing better than to butt in, Sammie sidestepped away with a grimace and moved closer to the old woman, raising a sceptical eyebrow.

“The Sight?” She couldn’t help the disbelief in her tone. “You… You _do_ realise that’s generally what happens when you take chems, right?”

“Oh, no. The Sight ain’t your run-of-the-mill substance high,” Mama Murphy pointed to Sammie matter-of-factly, her smile widening, “It’s so much more. I can see a bit of what was, and what will be. And even what is, right now.”

Now, _that_ wasn’t what Sammie had been expecting. She crossed her arms and studied the woman closely for a while, eyes flicking down to Dogmeat occasionally. So… This old crone was claiming to be a drug-fuelled psychic? Sammie found that understandably difficult to believe, but in the light of recent events consisting almost entirely of stuff that was difficult – sometimes even downright impossible – to believe, she was starting to wonder if there may be some grain of truth behind the cryptic words.

Or maybe Sammie had just finally cracked and started a downward spiral into madness. Whatever the case, she didn’t get the chance to dwell on it, because Mama Murphy suddenly croaked and went stiff as a bored.

“What?” Unsure how to respond to this, Sammie glanced about. Marcy and Jun had stopped muttering at each other and looked to Mama Murphy once they noticed, and Dogmeat sat up and watched her expectantly. Even Preston’s endless insistence that scrapping the laser muskets was too much of a risk in case they needed the weapons later on died down.

“And, oh… Right now I can there’s something coming!” Mama Murphy’s voice took on an edge, one that Sammie knew all too well. Dread. “Drawn by the noise, and the chaos. And it is… _Angry_.”

“Something’s coming? You mean the raider leader, right? That Sturges was talking about?” Sammie spoke before she fully processed her thoughts, but if she was right – that the boss of the gang that had been attacking the settlers was on their way – that was probably for the better. She looked to Preston and took a step back to where she had left the laser musket leaning against the wall, but Mama Murphy held up a hand to stop her. The woman’s eyes had gone wide, out of focus, like she was staring straight through the wall.

“Oh, no. I see… I see… Oh, it’s– it’s– it’s _horrible_ , kid! Claws and teeth and horns! The very face of _death_ itself!”

Sammie’s jaw hung slack in a gesture that could only hint at the confusion she felt.

“Woah, woah, woah! Mama Murphy, calm down!” Preston placed his own laser musket against the wall and made to move to Mama Murphy’s side, only to quickly double-back and pick the weapon up again when Sturges made a grab for it. “Where’d you even _find_ any chems in here, anyway?”

“I… May have gotten… A bit. A bit nervous,” Jun mumbled, wringing his hands together. All eyes still on Mama Murphy, his sheepish admission went ignored by pretty much everyone else in the room.

“You’re right, boy. I’ll take a moment to rest,” Mama Murphy said after a moment, blinking slowly as her head seemed to clear up. She held a hand up to her forehead, gaze slowly travelling over the others. “After all, you all have a job to do… A job that’s…” She trailed off again, squinting, “That’s… _Monumental_. Yeah. Monumental is the word.”

With that, a proper silence fell for the first time since Sammie had walked in. She felt a bit out of place while Mama Murphy leant down to pet Dogmeat and the others exchanged glances as if this entire situation was perfectly normal. She was in fact starting to give some more serious thought to her ‘going insane’ theory – or at least an ‘ _everyone else_ is insane’ variation on it – when Sturges threw a hand up in the air, waving it around to get attention.

“Wait a minute! ‘Monumental’? Let me try something! Three seconds, tops!” He scooted about in his chair and started clicking away at the terminal, which responded with a beep that made Sammie flinch lightly. Sturges stared at the screen, and then burst out laughing. “Ahahahaha! Yes! Mama Murphy, gone done it again!” He leaned back in the chair and beamed up at Sammie and Preston, pointing at the monitor. “Whoever curated this museum back in the day had either no imagination, or no long-term memory: The password was _Monument Street_! Spelled as one word, of course.”

Sammie felt her jaw drop open again, and briefly figured that that was going to become an ongoing problem over the next couple of weeks. The _password_? Mama Murphy had somehow _guessed_ it?

Looking back to the old woman, Sammie’s doubts about her credibility suddenly felt very flimsy.

“Alright!” Preston whopped, “I’ll go and see if I can find any fusion cores down in the basement. Sammie, since you’ve used Power Armour before, you run ahead and do any prep work you deem necessary to get it running. I’ll be back as soon as I can!”

With that, the Minuteman adjusted his grip on his musket and was out the door as quickly as he could be without tripping over the bodies. Marcy muttered something which Sammie chose to ignore in favour of asking how to get up onto the roof, and Sturges directed her to another door which allowed her to skirt around the wreckage of the vertibird to a fire escape which included a roof exit.


	4. At A Minute's Notice

Sammie eased open the door and peered through it, only stepping out when she was sure the aircraft’s chassis provided adequate cover from anyone who might try and shoot at her from the ground. The distant sound of voices while she heaved the sliding door on the vertibird’s side open betrayed that someone was about, and she had learned her lesson about being too trustful by now.

“Bingo!” There was a suit of Power Armour, alright, lain spread-eagle over the cargo bay. It was banged up and rustier than Nate’s Corvega had become over the years, but if there was one thing her husband had always reassured her of whenever he had been sent out to support a squad, back before they had started to see each other as much than just comrades, it was the ability for even the old prototype models of Power Armour to remain functional for as long as even the frame remained.

Sammie sighed. He had always come back from the fight then… Now, that could never happen again. So now was the time to make sure that she could at least return from hers.

Fortunately, the frame had mostly been spared from the wear and tear of time, shielded by both the armour pieces attached to it and the remains of the vertibird itself. Sammie ended up having to remove about half of the left arm coverings to make up for her own hampered movement, though, cursing to herself the whole time as she struggled to remember how the various connections came apart and in what order.

Preston arrived right as she was about to start the arduous process of unscrewing the release hatch, holding up a fist-sized yellow cartridge triumphantly.

“There was one? Oh, yes! And with perfect timing, too. These things take ages to open manually.” Sammie slapped the wheel on the suit’s back to indicate what she meant, and Preston nodded.

“I can imagine. I doubt the old military would have made it easy for anyone to get into these things unless they were _meant_ to be in them,” Preston replied. He glanced down at the fusion core, at the Power Armour, and then back to Sammie, pointing to the hole that the release hatch encircled. “So, uh. It just goes in here, right?”

“Yep,” Sammie stepped back. “You can do the honours. If this is anything like what I’ve used, the wheel should start to spin under its own power once you give it a push in the right direction.”

Garvey slotted the core in smoothly, and didn’t even jump when the suit started beeping and its hydraulic systems fired up to test their fluid pressure once the power flowed in. Much to their relief everything appeared to be in working order, even if the back of the suit folded open painfully slowly and with a wince-inducing whine. For a moment Sammie pondered how Preston might have handled himself had he been born in a different time and found himself in the US Army alongside herself and Nate.

“The hell man? Did anyone else hear that?”

“They’re not seriously trying to get that ‘bird up and running, are they? Hah!”

“Like we could _let_ them after what they did to Parker and co’!”

Sammie and Preston both froze. Thanking time was over.

“Looks like our friends are back…” Preston pressed himself against the side of the vertibird, and Sammie got down onto her knees while she tried to figure out how to best crawl into the Power Armour at such an odd angle. “I’ll get down to the door and try to keep it closed until you’re ready. Once the action starts, we’ll burst outta’ here and try to cover you as best we can.”

“Got it! You guys stay safe!” The words couldn’t mean much, but it felt right, at least.

Climbing into a suit of Power Armour could be awkward on the best of days, but literally _shimmying_ into it because it was face-down, too heavy to lift, and partially wedged into the back wall of the vertibird’s inside was a whole other ball game. Once the panels over the back slotted into place and the system beeped at her to indicate that all was miraculously online, though? Who cared about being careful. The hydraulics bucked at first from disuse, but once the fluid got moving Sammie was up and back on her feet after nearly falling over again only once.

Two heavy steps took her to where the vertibird’s minigun was rusted into its weapons mount, and Sammie smiled to herself in satisfaction upon finding that there were at least enough bullets left on the ammo belt for it to feed all of the way into the drum. With one last check of the heads-up display to affirm that the suit wasn’t about to just fall apart – and a moment to ponder how on earth the visor wasn’t covered in so much dust as to render her blind – Sammie placed one hand on the weapon’s handle and the other beneath the base of the barrel and… Stopped short of heaving to rip it out of the housing.

Sure, she had said that she’d used Power Armour before. In fact she had received extensive training in the use and upkeep of T-45 suits like this one during her single tour of Alaska as a conscript, and even gotten the chance to stomp around in T-51 for a few minutes when Nate got home from his final deployment.

But she had never said anything about using it an _actual combat situation_.

The vault dweller gulped, scolding herself for such thinking. She was wearing _Power Armour_ for crying out loud! Even an outdated suit of T-45b could hold its own relatively well against the Chinese army back in the day, and a handful of drifters with scavenged guns and improvised armour didn’t exactly compare to military precision armed with handheld artillery and cloaking technology that made stealth boys look like a primary school science project.

Now sufficiently convinced of her own superior position, Sammie set her shoulders beneath the metal plates of the suit and tore the minigun free of the vertibird wreckage.

Right.

Time to mow down some assholes preying upon the innocent.

They didn’t even really see it coming. By the time Sammie had made sure everything was operational and prepared herself for the coming fight, the raiders had already reached the door to the museum. Having poked around the scene of the shootout and determining that their guys had been wiped out, they had moved to go inside and flush Preston and company out of hiding just to be met with resistance in the form of three grown men throwing their weight into the doors to keep them closed.

Sammie heard swearing and yelling drifting up from both sides of the push-o-war down below, but it was nothing compared to what followed once the barrel of the minigun finished spinning up and showered them with lead.

First was the screaming of those by the door getting shredded, then confused shouts from further down the street where the rest of the raiders were waiting in ambush. Then the door slung open with a crash and Preston and Sturges burst out in a blaze of laser fire that only failed in comparison to Sammie’s own dramatic entrance, leaping from the rooftop and charging down the street with the Gatling gun a–roaring.

The gang of thugs may have been disorganised, but they weren’t stupid. Only a handful of bullets plinked uselessly against the Power Armoured berserker barrelling at them before common sense took over.

“Aaaaaahhhhh!”

“Run for it!”

“What the crap?!”

“This fucker’s bullet-proof!”

Those that weren’t cut down by bullet or laser before they had a chance to realise what was happening turned tail and _ran_ , giving Mama Murphy and the Longs their chance to slip outside as well. Sammie honestly didn’t blame them: She would have done the same in their situation.

She wouldn’t have screeched to a halt and started running _back towards the enemy_ while screaming at the top of her lungs though.

“What?” The suit’s age was showing, because even she could hear the crackle of static making her voice nigh-unrecognisable when she questioned Preston. Turns out it was just as effective in reverse, because whatever he had said in response was just a garbled mess through her internal speakers: All she had to work on was his eyes widening and him gesturing wildly at a shop to their left while the others ran there as fast as they could.

Following them, Sammie’s field of vision passed over the raiders sprinting at her with their arms flailing just in time to witness a scene straight out of a horror movie, a giant blur of green bursting from the ground and chasing them down while her speakers blasted static again.

A woman was dismembered in the time it took for Sammie’s brain to kick in properly, and she raised her minigun to start it spinning while the fastest raider reached her, took cover behind her leg, and started firing at the creature. His crude weapon was almost useless, the shouts bouncing off the thing’s hide as if it were steel. A blast of red from a window above the general store whammed the beast straight in the head, simultaneously confirming Preston’s relocation and knocking it off balance long enough for another would-be victim to duck down an alleyway.

The minigun roared to life and Sammie started peppering the mutated lizard with bullets as well, the sheer volume of lead causing it to screech and bound down the thoroughfare with a vengeance. Sammie’s mouth fell open as it knocked aside cars as if they were mere toys, and only superficial cuts and scrapes started to appear on its hide to show for her weapon’s effort.

“Jesus Christ on a pogo stick!” Power Armour or not, there was no way Sammie was staying put.

She threw herself to the side when it was upon her with a high-pitched wail. Whatever became of the man who had been sheltering behind her, Sammie didn’t know or care, too busy using the time his probable death bought her to scramble back onto her feet and point her gun back at the storm of claws and teeth and horns ripping the handful of humans about it to ribbons.

It wasn’t distracted for long, the raiders either all dead or having fled, and once it managed to outmanoeuvre her slow, Power Armoured ass, Sammie was cursing up a storm as she got thrown around like a ragdoll. It was only remembering how to lock the T-45’s hands that stopped the minigun from flying away from her grip, and a panicked kick when the armour of one of her legs was torn clean off of the suit lucked out and hit the reptile dead in the jaw. It screeched in pain, clutching at the bloodied mess of its mouth and face, and Sammie yelled out as well from her ears burning under the sheer volume of distorted audio that was being fed into them.

The world flashed red and not one, but two laser muskets fired, and the monster snarled in a rain of blood and mucous all over Sammie’s viewport before leaping for the building Preston’s group were taking shelter in.

“Shit!” Sammie swore, wiping away as much bodily fluid as she could to try and see properly before training her weapon back on the creature while it scrabbled and scaled its way up the side of the building. She thought she saw figures on the roof, firing down at it as fast as they could, and she squeezed the trigger so hard she thought her suit’s finger would fuse to the weapon’s grip while all but begging for the minigun’s barrel to reach operating speed faster.

They wouldn’t even last as long as the bandits did: She couldn’t let it get to them!

5mm rounds tore into the side of the building like a ray of ballistic, destructive sunshine, and Sammie swept the line of fire up at the beast’s arms. Words simply couldn’t describe her relief when a few seconds of sustained shooting tore into its flesh and rended an arm straight from its body.

The monster screamed, clawing at bricks, windows, the fire escape – anything to try and keep a grip with its remaining limbs – until Sammie’s ammo drum ran dry and another combo of max-crank laser musket shots sent it plummeting to slam into the concrete. Sammie dropped her weapon to try and shield herself from the resulting burst of blood and gore, but wasn’t fast enough to prevent herself from being blinded once again by a solid coat of red over her helmet.

In the following quiet Sammie realised how sore her throat was, and forced herself to stop gasping for air long enough to swallow some saliva and fumble for the Power Armour’s helmet release. Once free of the bloody tin can, she threw it aside and promptly shrieked up at the faces peering down at her from the rooftop.

“What the _actual fuck_ was _that?!_ ”

Sturges recoiled away and Preston stared at her, dumbfounded. Marcy and Mama Murphy were nowhere to be seen, and Sammie couldn’t tell if Jun looked whiter than a ghost or greener than a sandwich that had been left in the fridge for a month too long. Also dammit, now her throat hurt again.

She got her explanation once everyone picked their way back down the stairs to meet her.

“ _That_ was… A pretty darn amazing display.” Preston was the first to speak, his voice a bit squeakier than Sammie remembered. “I’m just glad you’re on our side!”

Sammie narrowed her eyes, and planned to reiterate her question only for Sturges to speak up first: “The woman asked a question, Garvey.”

“I– I know that!” Preston stammered back. Clearly he was as taken aback by the entire ordeal as Sammie was.

“That there critter’s what we call a Deathclaw,” Sturges continued, gesturing to the mangled remains which now had Dogmeat sniffing at them curiously, “No points for guessing why it’s called that. Ain’t never seen anyone take one on like that before… And honestly? I hope I never have to again! That was too close!”

Everyone else muttered agreement in varying subdued tones, and Sammie saw that the mechanic’s knuckles were just as white around the laser musket he was holding as Preston’s were.

“Death… Claw,” Sammie repeated. Mama Murphy’s words – “the very face of death itself” – echoed in her mind, and suddenly she felt quite dizzy.

“Listen… Uh, when we first talked, and you said you were willing to help?” Preston found his tongue again, and Sammie took the opportunity to try and get her own back, “Well, just now you did that and more. We owe you our lives.”

Sammie wasn’t exactly in the right state of mind to just gracefully accept the gratitude right now. “So, uh. What now? I’m not particularly keen on sticking around to see if another one of those things shows up.”

“The old neighbourhood to be made new again.” It was Mama Murphy who spoke up this time, layering on more of her vague riddles. “A sanctuary to spring forth from the cold, just when the Commonwealth needs it the most.”

“Mama Murphy’s had a vision of this place called ‘Sanctuary’ for the longest time,” Preston clarified, “It’s where we were going to be headed next, until those raiders showed up and got us pinned down… Hey, I know! Why don’t you come with us? We could really use someone like you around, and we’re going to need to make all of this up to you somehow anyway.”

Marcy said something in an appalled tone, which Sammie chose to ignore. “Sanctuary? Well, if you mean what I think you do, then you’re in luck. The vault I came from, it’s up near a housing development called Sanctuary Hills. I was actually going to head back there once I found someone to bring along, so I guess that works out for the both of us.”

“Really, now?” Preston’s eyes widened, and then his mouth did as well into a grin, “Great! I guess we’ll all follow your lead then.”

“It’s about a half-hour’s walk or so. I just hope this hunk of junk can stay in one piece long enough to get there…” Sammie tested her damaged leg, wincing at the sound of metal scraping on metal when she took a tentative step forwards. Sturges asked her to stand still for a moment, whipping out a screw driver and quickly removing the offending plate before giving her the thumbs-up.

They walked in silence for a while, paying special attention to any side streets they passed in case the last of the raiders decided to come back, but the only living things they say before leaving town were more crows slowly fluttering in, watching the group of humans depart with curious, brown eyes. Sturges asked what Sanctuary was like after they had been on the road for a few minutes, prompting a conversation to slowly gather strength around the topic. Tired of answering questions, and now curious about the group’s plans, Sammie made her own inquires on what their next steps would be and what they needed her to do.

“What you need to do is stay strong,” Mama Murphy interrupted, “Like you’ve already been, cause there’s more to your destiny. I’ve seen it.”

“Destiny?” Sammie deadpanned. This psychic stuff was starting to weird her out more than it had before. Mainly because everything the old hag had said so far had proven to be correct.

“You’re a woman out of time. Out of hope. But all is not lost,” she said, offering a crooked grin up at Sammie’s vantage point from the Power Armour frame, “I can feel your son’s energy. He’s alive!”

“My son?” The words fell out of Sammie’s mouth before she could properly register, “Where is–? How do you–? Aauuhh, you know what, never mind.” A jolt of pain split Sammie’s forehead and she was halfway towards hitting herself in the face with a metal fist before she remembered the Power Armour and stopped herself. This was all getting to be too much.

“You’ve been through so, so much. So much squeezed up into what seems like the blink of an eye,” Mama Murphy slowly nodded her head, “You need to rest, kid. Take a time out to process everything that’s going on. The other young’uns can take care of things for a while, don’t you worry. And don’t worry about your boy either, because he’s out there. You only need to take the first step when you’re ready.”

Rather than speak, Sammie simply nodded her acknowledgement, and focused instead on ignoring Marcy and Jun’s squabbling and taking the steps that would get her and her newfound companions to some semblance of home and safety.


	5. The Sight

With some more people to call Sanctuary – as they kept calling it despite Sammie’s attempts at correction, and ‘Hills’ still clearly being on the sign – home, the place no longer seemed quite so bleak. Sure, it hardly lived up the name just now: Most houses were still piles of rubble, the T-45 was now about as useful as its parts in scrap, and other supplies were limited to what everyone had on their backs, but with some effort that wouldn’t be the case forever.

More importantly, however, Sammie’s prospects of survival – and actually staying sane – no longer seemed quite so bleak either.

At first they all seemed surprised to find Codsworth, and Sammie knew then that the jig was up and she’d have to explain herself and the truth about Vault 111. Naturally no one believed her at first, but that stopped when she showed the place to them herself.

Things fell into a routine quickly after that. The first mornings were spent scavenging: Sammie, Preston, and Sturges took turns between venturing out into the surrounding woodlands for whatever they could find and staying back to stand guard while the others turned their attention to repairing the house across from Sammie’s as best they could. Whenever it was Sammie’s turn to be back in camp, she took to honing her abilities with the laser musket while the wastelanders gave her the run-down on the basics of life in the Commonwealth now: Tricks for properly defending yourself, that _bottlecaps_ , of all things, had become a standard currency, what plants and animals were safe to eat and what wasn’t… How to judge whether another person you’ve encountered in your travels might be friendly or hostile, considering what had happened to her upon meeting that first raider with Dogmeat. Stuff like that.

All of these were lessons that came in handy during her forays out of Sanctuary, particularly those about the local flora. Sammie’s old backyard was soon repurposed into a farm, seeded with all sorts of plants she was having to quickly learn: Mutfruit, tatoes, razorgrain, even the wild carrots Preston came back with one day were mutated beyond recognition. However it would be some time before it would start producing to an extent that regular episodes of hunting and gathering were no longer needed, and as their efforts slowly stripped the edible vegetation nearby, this fact hung heavily on Sammie’s mind.

At least, it did until Sammie and Dogmeat stumbled across another group of settlers who had built up a farm in the remains of a large transmission tower just under an hour’s walk away. They were understandably suspicious and didn’t seem particularly interested in sharing, but the close proximity was simply too good a chance at mutual protection to pass up. That night, Sammie passed on the information that, if they were willing to try and retrieve a locket from a group of raiders who had taken up residence further east, the Abernathy family would consider an alliance.

Back at base, Sturges took a particular interest in the area around Vault 111, and the issue of Codsworth not being able to supply enough clean water for six people was solved by organising regular trips up to it where everyone brought as many buckets as they could reasonably carry. He was even able to assemble some crude sentry turrets using parts from the vault and Sammie’s patchily-remembered knowledge of Power Armour mechanics.

But easy living, it wasn’t. Gone were the days of lazily sitting in front of the television with a Nuka Cola, because now physical labour had taken the place of ‘entertainment’. None of this was helped by a number of her newfound companions, either: Mama Murphy wasn’t really fit to do anything more than attend to the crops, and Marcy Long’s attitude seemed to be on a continual nosedive for the worse, her increasingly distraught husband being on the receiving end of the full brunt of her anger, getting driven further and further away into mumbling solitude. Sturges explained on one late night, while he and she were assembling street guns out of old plumbing, that their son had been among those killed shortly before Sammie showed up and drove the raiders off. He advised against even attempting to offer condolences, having copped a rant and near-beating the last time he tried to cheer the woman up.

Preston must have been making his own plans at the time, because the next day he made a proposal.

“ _Reform_ the _Minutemen_?” Sammie repeated, and the disbelief in her voice made the man flinch. “I don’t have anything against helping people out, but… You _do_ see that we’re just barely scraping by trying to keep ourselves alive, right?”

“Just bear with me a moment, please!” Preston held up his hands as if to defend himself should she throw a punch. “You remember what you said about those farmers out to the west, right? Well, yesterday I came across another group of people trying to establish a farm at Tenpines Bluff, a few hours in the opposite direction, who are starting to have raider problems as well. The last thing we need right now is raiders establishing themselves too close to us, so I thought that perhaps we could offer to help them out, see if they may be willing to return the favour.”

“So… Basically just an alliance to defend each other as best as we can?”

“Well, that is what the Minutemen have always been about: A few people who are willing to take up arms to help their fellow settlers out, in exchange for the same in return,” Preston said, “Perhaps we can even get the Abernathys on board as well. Sure, three settlements is hardly the Commonwealth-stretching force the Minutemen used to be, but there’s no doubt that the raiders who’ve been harassing them are nearby, too. And that doesn’t stand well for our safety.”

He had a good point, and the next day Sammie, Preston, Codsworth, and Sturges headed out to the town in question – not that they could really call two shacks built on the side of a cliff a _town_. The people living there were understandably sceptical of three people and a robot calling themselves the new Minutemen, but their attitude quickly changed when the offer to try and deal with their problems was put on the table. Sammie’s group and some local volunteers split up into two teams: One with Preston and Sturges heading north towards a satellite array, and the other with Sammie and Codsworth going south to Lexington’s Corvega assembly plant.

Astonishingly, they were actually able to kill off a good chunk of the raiders and send the rest fleeing without suffering any casualties, because one of the Tenpines residents happened to bring a long range rifle with him. That evening saw Sammie’s experience as a sniper during her single tour of duty in Alaska finally put to good use, picking off the guards outside and on top of the assembly plant from the roofs of nearby buildings, and then the panic of the survivors did the rest of the job: Some sort of freak accident must have occurred, because when everyone finally built up the courage to storm the inside of the building, an explosion rocked the main factory floor and the remaining raiders either fled or were mopped up one-by-one.

Sammie decided she much preferred it this way, where dealing the death-blow felt significantly less personal.

They stayed the night to scavenge anything useful, and Sammie learned some interesting things about the Corvega plant’s former residents by reading through terminal entries while exchanging her vault suit for some cargo pants and a faded shirt and jacket that didn’t paint a bright, blue and yellow target on her. This was in fact where the group of bandits who had been hunting Preston and company had come from, and their objective all along had been to capture Mama Murphy and stuff her full of chems to use the Sight.

Sammie would have scoffed at their blind belief in the old lady’s powers, except that she had already seen them in action multiple times now, when Murphy predicted the Museum’s terminal password, and the subsequent appearance of the Deathclaw.

It was with a heavy heart that she picked up an inhaler and hid it away in her backpack when no one was looking. Mama Murphy had requested something called Jet that sounded just like it, and while Sammie was reluctant to feed into her habits, the past week had yielded no information on where she might start looking for Nate’s killers, or Shaun.

When they arrived back at Tenpines Bluff, the mood was celebratory: The settlers who had gone north were already back before Sammie’s group, and they recounted a tale of finding an old robotics disposal yard where Sturges had managed to find and reprogram a _fully functioning sentry bot_ into wiping the raiders at the satellite array off of the map. While the robot had received too much damage to come back with them, the resounding success of the mission made her own teammates’ account of Sammie’s sniping abilities sound appropriately mediocre by comparison.

The people of Tenpines pledged their support to the Minutemen, and explained that Preston and Sturges had left earlier to return the stolen locket and go back home. Before Sammie and Codsworth could leave as well, however, it was insisted that she keep the sniper rifle in exchange for her help, an offer which Sammie only accepted on the condition that they take the pistol she got out of Vault 111. Sure, it wasn’t quite an even trade, but she explained she would be able to sleep better knowing that they weren’t giving up quite _as much_ firepower.

“I’m not sure whether to be weirded out, or just grateful that _anyone_ has some generosity left in them these days,” Sammie mused, readjusting the strap she had cobbled together out of a harness so that she could sling the rifle over her shoulder, resting it beneath her backpack. She was going to need to make some alterations once she returned to Sanctuary and Sturges’ workbench, because it kept butting up against the brim of the stockman hat she had taken to wearing, causing it to almost fall off her head more than once.

“I’m certain the locals thought the same when we showed up, too, ma’am!” Codsworth casually commented, floating out over the water of the river in order to avoid a rocky outcrop that Sammie had to climb over while using her laser musket as a hiking pole. Watching the relative ease with which he was able to navigate actually made Sammie feel a touch envious: She wasn’t exactly _unfit,_ so to say, but the ‘roughing it’ lifestyle wasn’t something she was acclimatising to fast. “And now look at them! No longer having to worry about those chavs bugging them, and saying they’ll spread the word of the Minutemen being back? It’ll be so good to see them patrolling the Commonwealth again once they’re on their feet – heavens know I missed the conversation whenever they passed through town.

“‘Passed through town’, huh?” Sammie asked, stepping off the side of the rock and hitting the riverbank with a wet thud, “The Minutemen used to visit, did they?”

“Only on the occasion, and now that I think about it, only ever the same three… Oh, what’s this now?” Codsworth moved ahead, across Sammie’s path and between two trees. Sammie stared momentarily, then followed cautiously, placing a hand on the crank of her musket just in case. What had his sensors picked up?

“…Please help! I don’t want to die!” The voice set off alarm bells and Sammie picked up the pace. Could it be more raiders? Or perhaps someone had stumbled across a pack of those rabid dogs she had seen once? Either way, they needed help, and Sammie wasn’t about to just walk away.

“Shut your mouth or I swear I’ll shut it for you!”

Coming into a clearing, what Sammie and Codsworth stumbled into was a man holding another who was on his knees at gunpoint. Sammie raised her musket at the aggressor, but stopped in confusion before she could charge the capacitor. She did a double-take.

…Correction: A man holding his _twin_ at gunpoint?

“I– What? What’s going on here?” Sammie demanded, though her voice didn’t exactly carry the authoritarian tone she had been going for.

The man with the shotgun froze and peered up Sammie’s own barrel. She responded by steadying her grip on the musket, to which he stiffened, but his aim didn’t waver from the other man’s head.

“Please! You’ve got to help me!” The guy on his knees saw his chance and took it, pleading to Sammie, “This guy’s a synth! And he’s going to kill me and replace me and family! Oh god, my kids…”

“Don’t you _dare_ bring them up!” Before Sammie could even open her mouth to respond, the other yelled out, enraged. “ _He’s_ the synth! And he wants to replace _me_!”

“Please, please you’ve got to believe me! You can’t let that thing do this!”

Sammie croaked awkwardly, eyes darting between the two men, and Codsworth hovered beside her in silence save for the occasional clank of his mechanical arms. It seemed he was just as bewildered as she was.

“O-okay, let’s all just calm down here! No one has to die.” She had too many questions before she could make any sort of informed decision. “At least not until I have some idea of what’s going on here. For starters: What the _hell_ is a ‘synth’?”

“Oh, you have got to be– No!” The man with the shotgun yelled out in exasperation, and Sammie hastily cranked her musket in case he decided to turn the weapon on her. Fortunately, that didn’t happen: What she instead got was a pleading look. “He wants me dead! And he’ll never stop until I am! I have to kill him!”

“Don’t listen to it! It’ll say anything to convince you!”

“I didn’t ask for your opinion!” Sammie snapped, and the one on his knees shrunk under her glare. She may have a gun pulled on his attacker, but that didn’t mean she was necessarily on his side. She returned her attention to his twin. “Look. All I need is for you to put down the gun. Then, we can all talk this through.”

“A discussion over tea and biscuits isn’t best served with a side of lead, after all,” Codsworth added.

“I…” He was hesitant, gritting his teeth, then finally his shoulders slumped, “Alright. I’m lowering the gun.”

“Oh… Thank god!” The person on his knees breathed a sigh of relief and stood up while Sammie lowered her own weapon. Good, now they could properly explain what on Earth was going on here, maybe even actually talk like civilised human beings! “…Now I just have to dig two graves.”

“Wha–?” Sammie blurted.

The man yelled and lunged for her, and Sammie dove out of the way of a blue streak of laser fire with her own yell. His counterpart swore, blindly shooting from the waist and failing to hit anything, and when Sammie hit the floor she heard Codsworth’s buzzsaw spin up followed by an agonised scream.

It was cut off by a second blast of shotgun pellets, followed by a second thud of a person falling to the ground.

Sammie caught her breath, frozen where she had fallen until the remaining man offered a shaking hand to help her up. She swallowed and accepted, climbing to her feet.

“Oh, gosh. I– I’m so sorry,” he stammered, and Sammie, still trying to make sense of what had just happened, waved a hand at him dismissively. “I know from where you were standing it must’ve been confusing, but… I. I didn’t think it’d–”

“Don’t… Don’t apologise,” Sammie coughed, then risked a glance at the body. She immediately looked back and busied herself with discharging the laser musket. “I’m… Not from around here,” she decided to go with, “Didn’t know what to think. Let alone _do_.”

The man actually seemed to mellow out at that comment, but his smile was short-lived. “You’re telling me! I… Uh… I’m Art, but you know what? I’m just going to say this: If you can at all, _please_ , just… Go back home. The Commonwealth isn’t a place you want to be! The Institute, they– they kill you, or, or steal you away in the night and replace your friends with machines and. No one knows why! You’re safer anywhere else. Trust me.”

“I’m Sammie,” she responded, though the rest of his words only garnered a confused look. Sammie also felt Codsworth hover closer behind her, one or more of his eye stalks no doubt bobbing over her shoulder, and she got the feeling that asking him wouldn’t clear anything up. “You said something about… ‘Synths’, was it? Is that what you mean? This guy was a… A _robot_? Trying to replace you?”

The man nodded gravely, and Sammie looked back at the body. Codsworth had managed to slice his hand clean off – a white laser pistol was still clenched in the disembodied palm – and the rest was peppered with shot holes. Blood was pooling in the dirt around him.

Sammie wasn’t exactly a robotics expert, but that didn’t look like a machine to her.

“Look, I… I’m a bit shaken up right now, miss,” Art shook his head, clutching at his upper arm and averted his gaze, “I don’t really want to talk about it. I need to get back to my family, and, uh. Thanks. I guess.”

Sammie blew air through her nose in irritation but nodded nonetheless, bidding him good luck before he turned to leave with once last glance at the… Synth, as he had called it. Codsworth retrieved the laser pistol with a comment about not letting it go to waste, to which Sammie agreed: Even if nothing else, it could at least be broken down for parts, and Sturges needed all the functioning tech he could get his hands on if he was going to finish up that water purifier he was trying to cobble together now that everyone was getting tired of carting water down from the vault.

It was about mid-afternoon when Sammie returned to Sanctuary, finding the man in question already hammering away at a cluster of pipes he was trying to make stick together in something resembling a network of filters. Sammie explained how Corvega had gone in brief while she dropped off the spoils of her scavenging, and when urged to go into further detail, instead decided to promise that she’d explain more once Preston got back from Abernathy Farm.

Codsworth stayed back to help with the purifier while Sammie trekked up north in search of something that could be shot for a more substantial meal than Cram and berries, though returned with a measley three squirrels. While hanging them up by their tails on a hatstand next to where the fire was lit each night, her distracted musing about the events of that morning and how to avoid getting guilt-tripped into giving up her share of the squirrel to Marcy saw an end when Mama Murphy hobbled out of the house.

“I see you’re starting to take care of yourself nicely out here, kid,” the woman commented, looking Sammie up and down to take in her new outfit, “But have you thought any more about what you’re going to do _with_ yourself, now starving to death ain’t such a concern?”

Tying off the last squirrel, Sammie gave her a sideways glance. There was a glimmer in the old lady’s eyes, and Sammie got a hunch about what she was hinting at.

“My ‘lack of direction’ is really that obvious, huh?” She couldn’t be bothered making up excuses anymore. Even with how well the day had started, that energy had quickly faded during the long walk home and the confusion of what had happened with Art, the lacklustre results of her hunting trip only wrapping it all up in a neat package of apathy.

Sanctuary not even feeling like a home anymore didn’t help either.

“You’re busying yourself, kid. With anything to keep your mind off of the world around you, and off the questions you’re too afraid to ask,” Mama Murphy stated with a sympathetic smile, “I don’t need the Sight to be able to tell that.”

“Whelp, you got me!” Sammie threw her arms up in overblown sarcasm, “The world’s been blown away and here I am, apparently two hundred years later, eating small, furry rodents while asking myself what happened to all the chicken. Never once thought I’d be able to miss take-out!”

Mama Murphy chuckled, but shook her head. “You know what I meant, Sammie. If it ever starts eating at you too much, just remember that the Sight and I are here for you.”

She shuffled back indoors, and Sammie actually considered her words for a bit longer than she would have usually considered appropriate. Mama Murphy was right – she wasn’t accomplishing anything here beyond simply existing, and while Preston certainly had larger plans for their little militia once it got off the ground, that wasn’t going to help her find Shaun.

“Mama Murphy?” Sammie took a step to follow but hesitated, recomposed herself, before ducking inside and picking up her backpack in the process. No, clinging to her morals in a world that had no place for them was only going to lead her to a sleepless night filled with wondering ‘what if?’. She was going to have to learn to live with making less-than-ideal decisions, so it was best to start with something relatively small.

…Right?

“So a woman out of time tries to get with the times, huh?” Sat on the edge of a thread-bare couch in the house’s living room, Mama Murphy smirked. Sammie raised an eyebrow in confusion, and the grin faded. “Yeah, you’re right. I’m long past my days of cracking a good joke. But that’s not what you’ve come in here for, isn’t it?”

“No, you had a point,” Sammie admitted, clutching her backpack tightly and pressing her lips together in distaste. Dammit, woman! Stop stalling. “There isn’t anything here for me anymore. I’m starting to realise that, now that I’ve seen that there are people out there trying to make a place for themselves. I need to do the same, and find my son, but…”

She grumbled to herself, not wanting to say it. Facing mutant wildlife and bandits all trying to murder you was scary enough, but owning up to not even knowing what to do with herself was a different type of fear, one as innately human as the egos most people carried with them even when reduced to subsistence farming. She plunged her hand into the bag and fished about for that inhaler.

“I don’t even know where to start,” she finished, taking in a sharp breath to stop herself from choking on a sob. Mama Murphy nodded in understanding, but any of her empathy was lost when Sammie revealed the Jet, replaced with an eager grin as she stood and crept forward. “I came across this when helping the folks at Tenpines... Swiped it when I realised it matched the description you gave me a couple of days ago.”

“So, you were listening after all. And here I was thinking you were ignoring ole’ Mama Murphy like a child with her hands over her ears when I brought that up.”

“Just… All I want is some direction,” Sammie said, pulling the inhaler out of the old woman’s reach before she could snatch it, “I’m sorry, but there’ll be no more chems coming from me after this. I don’t want you to go and ruin what good health you’ve got left.”

Much to her relief, Mama Murphy nodded.

“That’s fine, and this’ll do,” she accepted Sammie’s reasoning, and held out a hand expectantly, “Now let me ride the high to where the Sight wants to take me.”

Watching someone who was more than twice her own age… _Biological_ age, huff on a narcotics-filled inhaler was a surreal experience, but it didn’t even make Sammie’s top five of weird things she had witnessed since emerging from Vault 111. It was reflecting on those – and fretting about what else she may have yet to see – that kept her occupied while Mama Murphy muttered her way through the worst effects of the drug, blinking hallucinations away as the high began to wear off.

“I saw a man, but… He ain’t gonna be what you’d expect.” Murphy actually sounded puzzled as she recounted her vision, and Sammie didn’t even try to stop her shoulders from slumping in disappointment.

“That’s… That’s it?” So what? She had narrowed down her search criteria to fifty percent of the Commonwealth’s population? Sammie was starting to suspect that she had been used.

“Oh. Oh no. I just thought that bit was pretty intriguing,” Mama Murphy answered, “The Sight’s a fickle thing: Often the most important part is cut off before I can get a good look, so I’ve learned to make a point out of trying to remember.”

“I… I’ll keep that in mind.” Sammie wrung her hands and glanced towards the door. The last thing she needed right now was one of the others walking in on this and realising that Sammie had given the old coot something hazardous. “Uh, what else did you see?”

“The Great, Green Jewel,” Mama Murphy grinned, now well and truly starting to regain her faculties, “Diamond City is the biggest settlement around, and it holds the answers. But they’re locked up tight: You ask them what they know, but the people’s hearts are chained up with fear and suspicion.

“But you’ll find it. You’ll find that heart that’s gonna lead you to your boy, and oh… Is it bright. So bright against the dark alleys it walks.”

“Diamond City, then.” Sammie thought she had recalled that being mentioned one morning over breakfast, and filed the information away to bring up later. She would have to ask about it and how to get there, but not straight away: Having to explain that she wanted to leave and why was a minefield she didn’t particularly feel like trying to navigate today.

“Yeah. Diamond City. That’s where you need to go, kid… Follow the signs to the bright heart…” Mama Murphy finished, and it was only now that Sammie noticed the slur starting to creep into her speech.

“Mama Murphy? Are you alright?” She stepped forward worriedly, but Mama Murphy held up a hand to stop her and sat back down on the couch.

“Yeah, that just… Took more out of me than usual. I’m gonna need to rest for a bit now, but I’ll be alright, kid,” she answered, and Sammie reluctantly stepped back with a slow nod. “How about you go and see how the others are, alright? Preston should be back by now. I’ll join you all for dinner a bit later.”

The sun was starting to set when Sammie stepped outside once more, and a quick inspection of Sanctuary revealed that Preston was indeed back, helping Sturges with the water pump by using a large tree branch to try and clear rubbish and debris out of a shallower section of the river. Sammie stepped in to help and he explained that the Abernathys sent their thanks, bringing their total number of allied settlements to three. They discussed plans on how to start equipping everyone and spreading the word until it was dark enough to make removing the last of the junk unfeasible, and returned to camp to find that Jun had already started the fire and was in the process of spitting the squirrels.

Dinner was accompanied by a relatively jovial atmosphere: Those who had left and returned shared their stories of Tenpines, with only minimal attempts made to one-up each other by ‘enhancing’ the details. Jun actually stood up to Marcy when she inevitably complained about only getting leafy greens, pointing out that the people who had actually risked their skins and gone out into the wasteland deserved the meat more. Sammie offered to give both of the Longs some more pointers on their shooting if they wanted to start eating heartier, and they both actually agreed with varying levels of reluctance.

She was able to fit in her questioning about Diamond City as small-talk without raising too much suspicion, but she decided against bringing up Art and his synth, or asking about the Institute he had mentioned. The answers to that question would come in due time, and she had enough to worry about on her plate already.

Her promise to Nate no longer seeming _as_ impossible as it had before, Sammie slept relatively soundly that night, and the next day she discussed her next steps with Codsworth before breaking the news.

Thankfully, everyone was understanding to at least some degree. Even Marcy, although Sammie theorised that may have more to do with Marcy no longer having to put up with her than any sort of actual concern for Sammie’s situation. Of course, she wouldn’t be going immediately – she still had her promise of giving the Longs some training to keep, and was planning to help Preston and Sturges come up with ideas for a radio beacon calling for volunteers to found a new faction of Minutemen – but being able to make a decision and no longer having to worry about how it would be taken meant that she could focus on making the time she would be remaining in Sanctuary _count_.

After all, in only a few days she would be going home. Wherever that may turn out to be.


End file.
